Monday, April 16, 2007

Making drugs in space

The aerospace company Spacehab is starting a division to look into manufacturing drugs in space. The company is making its pitch at the Space Investment Summit in New York on Monday.

Space has long been heralded as a frontier for drug development. NASA has done experiments to study the 3D growth of protein crystals in the microgravity conditions of space, hoping that understanding their structure will help drug designers develop new treatments that target specific diseases.

But I don't think drug development in space has lived up to its promise so far. Part of the problem for research and any future large-scale manufacturing of drugs is the high cost of launching things to space.

Then there's the simple matter of time. Spacehab mentions the possibility of doing its drug development on the International Space Station – the only place currently available for long-term habitation off the planet.

The station's crews of two and three spend most of their time maintaining the spacecraft and don't have a lot of leftover time for experiments. Sometime in 2009, however, the crew is expected to expand to six, which could allow for more research time.

But soon there may be other non-NASA platforms in space. Bigelow Aerospace, which has already launched an inflatable test craft, hopes to deploy more modules in the future, and some of these might be used as commercial laboratories.

Spacehab had sued NASA for $87.7 million for one of their modules that was lost in the Columbia accident in 2003. NASA paid the company $8.2 million, and in February 2007, Spacehab dropped the lawsuit, citing the fact that NASA was their largest customer.

What do you think of Spacehab's plans? Will they help the company out of its financial trouble?

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